Turnover Resources and Advice

Some level of employee turnover is a necessary and expected part of any modern workforce. Successful organizations plan on turnover, and plan for it in intelligent ways. Through succession planning, proactive recruitment, and retention strategies, the negative effects of employee turnover can be mitigated.

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Turnover in business refers to the net rate at which an employer gains, loses and, by implication, retains employees. The cost of employee turnover to employers can be high, and involves many factors that are often overlooked by the employers. Research shows that the expenses that are involved include recruitment and hiring costs such as administrative time and screening and interviewing time, lost productivity in the forms of time during replacement, training time of new hires, and time away from their own jobs, lost by other employees in helping a new hire get up to speed, unemployment expenses and other sometimes unseen costs.

Causes for turnover can include employees' searching for higher paying jobs, lower performance or poor culture on the company side of the ledger, job characteristics or expectations, and individual issues of an employee that are outside of the employer's control. The cost of the turnover of an employee has been estimated to be between 150% and 250% of the employee's annual pay. With such high costs involved, it is a necessary and desirable goal of companies to reduce the turnover in their organization by as much as possible through talent retention and development, as well as through a more stringent hiring process.

The five areas that must be addressed with employees in order to minimize the turnover rate at an organization are environmental (workplace safety and culture), relationship (between employee and employer, usually by way of direct manager, or co-worker relations), support (through training), growth (the possibility of advancement and gaining new skills), and compensation (through pay and benefits). By combining an effective and well-planned retention strategy with a risk mitigation program for loss of talent, many of the ill-effects from turnover can be reduced. The HR department should work in conjunction with the executive management team to ensure that turnover ratios and retention strategies are closely examined to optimize them.

Staff turnover-roughly speaking, some measure (of organizational performance) based on the number of staff who leave during a given period-can be mathematically conceived in various ways. Perhaps the simplest-the number of people who leave an organization during a specified period-is also one unlikely to be used.

There are some perspectives from which staff turnover-departure and replacement of staff, for whatever reason-may appear to be or in fact can be a "good thing", e.g., when "new blood", fresh approaches, etc., are required...